4 Terrific Indie Author Resources

The e-Publishing Diaries: PBS’s MediaShift and Other Supportive Resources

August 8 (P Minus 24): Today’s updates:

Received an email from Bowker’s saying that my ISBN order is being processed and should be emailed soon (more about ISBNs later this week; it’s more complicated than I first thought)
Began gathering visuals for a book trailer
Changed the method of file sharing for the Kindle sample chapter to Dropbox, after the Box.net widget looked too clunky (see upper right; I will add more file versions, including a pdf, in the coming days and weeks)
Am getting excellent proofreading feedback from my eagle-eye final proofreader
Am almost ready to send out blog tour information and options to those who expressed interest
Am generally far too excited about working on Oscar, given the other work I also need to do during the day!

Here are a few really good resources I’ve found recently and have learned from. At the end of this series, I’ll collect all of the links in one place to share in a tab.

1. PBS’s MediaShift (“Your Guide to the Digital Media Revolution”) has a section titled BookShift that has several informative, interesting, and motivating articles, such as these:

2. Jenny Blake has put together an amazing 15-tab “Book Marketing Master Spreadsheet.” Download it. Now. (Shared by Seth Godin)

3. “Self-Published or Independent? What’s in a Name Anyway?” makes the argument for using the descriptor “independent publisher” rather than “self-published,” and offers some valuable perspective-changing tools in the process.

4. Finally, Bryan Young similarly argues why authors should consider “approaching book publishing as an entrepreneur” in “Combating the Stigma of Self-Publishing“:

“JK Rowling was rejected by 12 publishers before Bloomsbury Press picked her up. Would it have made the Harry Potter books somehow less good if she went to self-publish them instead of try another publisher? Maybe they wouldn’t have had the runaway success they did, but she certainly wouldn’t have produced a bad book.

On the other side of the coin, how many terrible books have you read coming from publishers? The answer is a lot. They get it wrong as often as anybody. They really aren’t the tastemakers people seem to give them credit for.”